Unfiltered Story #299786
One of my first jobs out of college was to work at a mail-order pharmacy as a data entry technican. Basically, I worked with colleagues in a giant warehouse style building lined with cubicles and review a screenshot of doctor prescriptions for patients. And yes, a lot of doctors’ handwritings are horrible.
It didn’t pay great and was not a career path for me but I needed something while I searched for my true career path. I first had to go through three weeks of paid training with about a dozen other people before we were put on the floor.
Some of the people I got to know became good work friends and we’d chat together and complain about stuff at lunch time. However, one lady in particular is the focus of this story and I’ll call her Red basically because she had long dark red hair and was the only red-haired person we worked with.
I quickly realized that this lady was going to be the butt of many jokes to come for a lot of us. She told tall tales of her life before coming to work at this job, acted like she was “hot stuff” and knew things, and talked loudly and obnoxiously to anyone who gave her attention.
Basically, Red liked being the center of attention but wasn’t the greatest at her job even though she claimed otherwise. It got on the nerves of a lot of us during training and then continued after we were promoted to the main floor. She was often the topic of our lunch chats as one lady friend had to sit in a cubicle behind Red and listen to her munch snacks loudly or talk on the phone to her boyfriend (which wasn’t really productive).
All of Red’s antics were noteworthy to us but one in particular stands out. Weird sounds were coming from the lady’s bathroom one morning that my friend needed to use the bathroom. While the sounds would be hard to hear over people on the phone in cubicle city a little distance from the bathrooms, they were at least noticeable to my friend as she got to within 20 feet of the bathrooms. As she approached the bathrooms, she could make out the sounds of a dog barking for a few seconds. Confused and curious, she got closer to the door, and pushed the door open. Looking around the bathroom, she only saw the legs of one person in an occupied stall near the far wall. At first she thought it was the person on the phone playing with ringtones or something on the internet. But as she made to walk in, the barking resumed and it sounded like a person trying to imitate a dog barking.
She immediately recognized the voice of the “barker” as being Red. My friend let the door close behind her but Red continued barking into her phone and didn’t notice what should have been a fairly obvious sound. Now, not wanting to pass up a golden opportunity to get back at Red for her obnoxiousness, my friend then stood by a stall near the door and bellowed “WOOF! WOOF! in a baritone style voice. It easily echoed across the bathroom. Red (now beet red in the face) opened the stall door and ran out of the bathroom in a hurry, barely registering there was another person in there.
Red surely saw my friend return several minutes later as it was easy to see who went into the bathrooms from our cubicles but for some reason never said a word to my friend about it nor did she talk to her boyfriend on the phone at her desk for the rest of that day. We later found out that she was talking to her boyfriend and his dog over the phone and her boyfriend had been barking back.
I still wonder why Red thought she could do it “in secret” in a bathroom with echoing walls where somebody could easily walk in on her barking into her phone.
